No abstract

One of the challenges in developing multi-robot systems is the design of appropriate coordination strategies in such a way that robots perform their operations efficiently. In particular, efficient coordination requires judicious task allocation. Without appropriate task allocation, the use of multi-robot systems in complex scenarios becomes limited or even unfeasible. Real-world scenarios usually require the use of heterogeneous robots and task fulfillment with different structures, constraints, and degrees of complexity. In such scenarios, decentralised solutions seem to be appropriate for task allocation, since centralised solutions represent a single point of failure for the system. During the allocation process, in decentralised approaches, there are often communication requirements, as participants need to share information. Maintaining data integrity, resilience, and security in data access are some of the important features for this type of solution. In that direction, we propose an architecture for dynamic and decentralised allocation of tasks built on the idea of having communication and coordination in a multi-agent system through a private blockchain.

No abstract

No abstract

Task allocation is an important aspect of multiagent coordination. However, there are many challenges in developing appropriate strategies for multiagent teams so that they operate efficiently. Real‐world scenarios such as flooding disasters usually require the use of heterogeneous robots and the execution of tasks with different structures and complexities. In this paper, we propose a decentralized task allocation mechanism considering different types of tasks for heterogeneous agent teams where agents play different roles and carry out tasks according to their own capabilities. We have run several experiments to evaluate the proposed mechanism. The results show that the proposed mechanism appears to scale well and provides near‐optimal allocations.